Joseph Campbell Quotes

Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life.

Anything you do has a still point. When you are in that still point, you can perform maximally.

Men sometimes confess they love war because it puts them in touch with the experience of being alive. In going to the office every day, you don't get that experience, but suddenly in war, you are ripped back into being alive. Life is pain; life is suffering; and life is horror - but, by God, you are alive.

Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed.

There are something like 18 billion cells in the brain alone. There are no two brains alike; there are no two hands alike; there are no two human beings alike. You can take your instructions and your guidance from others, but you must find your own path.

A one sentence definition of mythology? Mythology is what we call someone else's religion.

Preachers err by trying to talk people into belief; better they reveal the radiance of their own discovery.

The function of artists is "the mythologization of the world."

Midlife is when you reach the top of the ladder and find that it was against the wrong wall.

If you have a sacred place and use it, take advantage of it, something will happen.

Religon is misunderstood mythology

We keep thinking of deity as a kind of fact, somewhere; God as a fact. God is simply our own notion of something that is symbolic of transcendence and mystery. The mystery is what’s important.

Love your enemies, for they determine who you are.

All societies are evil, sorrowful, inequitable; and so they will always be. So if you really want to help this world, what you will have to teach is how to live in it. And that no one can do who has not himself learned how to live in it in the joyful sorrow and sorrowful joy of the knowledge of life as it is.

If you really want to help this world, what you will have to teach is how to live in it.

If you want to find out what it means to have a society without any rituals, read the New York Times.

The best we can do is lean towards the light.

The departure from the world is regarded not as a fault, but as the first step into that noble path at the remotest turn of which illumination is to be won.

If you want to know what a given society believes in, look at what its largest buildings are devoted to.

If there were already a path, it would have to be someone else's; the whole point is to find your own way.

One looks, looks long, and the world comes in.

The insecure way is the secure way.

It may be a species of impudence to think that the way you understand God is the way God is. (60).

All the old bindings are broken. Cosmological centers now are anywhere and everywhere. The earth is a heavenly body, most beautiful of all, and all poetry is now archaic that fails to match the wonder of this view.

I don't need faith. I have experience.

When you make the sacrifice in marriage, you're sacrificing not to each other but to unity in a relationship.

Every people is a chosen people in its own mind. And it is rather amusing that their name for themselves usually means mankind.

Whenever men have looked for something solid on which to found their lives, they have chosen not the facts in which the world abounds, but the myths of an immemorial imagination.

Love is exactly as strong as life.

There is a condescension on the part of the infinite to the mind of man. That is what looks like God.

When people get married because they think it's a long-time love affair, they'll be divorced very soon, because all love affairs end in disappointment. But marriage is a recognition of a spiritual identity.

The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.

And then he says, "The writer must be true to truth." And that's a killer, because the only way you can describe a human being truly is by describing his imperfections. The perfect human being is uninteresting - the Buddha who leaves the world, you know. It is the imperfections of life that are lovable. And when the writer sends a dart of the true word, it hurts. But it goes with love. This is what Mann called "erotic irony," the love for that which you are killing with your cruel, analytical word.

When I was in India I met and conversed briefly with Shri Atmananda Guru of Trivandrum, and the question he gave me to ponder was this: 'Where are you between two thoughts?

Could God exist if nobody else did? No. That’s why gods are very avid for worshipers. If there is nobody to worship them, there are no gods. There are as many gods as there are people thinking about God. In choosing your god, you choose your way of looking at the universe. There are plenty of Gods. Choose yours. The god you worship is the god you deserve.

Eternity is not a long time; rather, it is another dimension. It is that dimension to which time-thinking shuts us. And so there never was a creation. Rather, there is a continuous creating going on. This energy is pouring into every cell of our being right now, every board and brick of the buildings we sit in, every grain of sand and wisp of wind.

You know, I didn't write my books for critics and scholars. I wrote them for students and artists. When I hear how much my work has meant to them--well, I can't tell you how happy that makes me. That means that this great stuff of myth, which I have been so privileged to work with, will be kept alive for a whole new generation. That's the function of the artists, you know, to reinterpret the old stories and make them come alive again, in poetry, painting, and now in movies.

You have been thinking one way. Now you have to think a different way.

Read myths. They teach you that you can turn inward, and you begin to get the message of the symbols. Read other people's myths, not those of your own religion, because you tend to interpret your own religion in terms of facts -- but if you read the other ones, you begin to get the message.

A ritual is the enactment of a myth. And, by participating in the ritual, you are participating in the myth. And since myth is a projection of the depth wisdom of the psyche, by participating in a ritual, participating in the myth, you are being, as it were, put in accord with that wisdom, which is the wisdom that is inherent within you anyhow. Your consciousness is being re-minded of the wisdom of your own life.

All men are capable of reason. That is the fundamental principle of democracy Because everybody's mind is capable of true knowledge, you don't have to have a special authority, or a special revelation telling you that this is the way things should be.

The schizophrenic is drowning in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight. Edgar Cayce made the same observation in his readings

A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.

The big problem of any young person's life is to have models to suggest possibilities. Nietzsche says, 'Man is the sick animal.' Man is the animal that doesn't know what to do with itself. The mind has many possibilities, but we can live no more than one life. What are we going to do with ourselves?

The call to adventure signifies that destiny has summoned the hero.

And that Aha! that you get when you see an artwork that really hits you is, 'I am that.' I am the very radiance of energy that is talking to me through this painting.

I think it's important to live life with a knowledge of its mystery, and of your own mystery.

If you have the guts to follow the risk...if one follows what I call one's "bliss" - the thing that really gets you deep in the gut and that you feel is your life - doors will open up...if you follow your bliss, you'll have your bliss, whether you have money or not.